hello friends, I am trying out a LONGPOST here on cohost dot com, because I had thoughts I needed to remove from my skullparts, and also I wanna try out some of the fancy markdown stuff here
I spend perhaps an unreasonable amount of time thinking about why Beauty and the Beast 2017 did not work for me but Cinderella 2015 did. I’ve rewatched the live-action BatB more times than any other movie that I dislike, in part because I am so adamantly convinced that the project could have worked. Cinderella convinced me that the Disney live-action remakes CAN be good movies while still being blatant cashgrabs.
So I wanted to sit down and figure out how I would fix this movie and make it something actually good. There’s a couple of big things that I think would improve the movie even if there were no changes directly to the script, but then a sub-section of script changes that I would make. I’ve put those in together under the last item, which naturally includes hiring a different screenwriter.
But even if you didn’t change the story elements here, I have some more superficial thoughts that would have vastly improved this movie.
Don’t Make it a Musical
I said what I said. Part of the reason Cinderella 2015 works is that it is not a musical. Don’t get me wrong, I love the songs of Beauty and the Beast. But keeping the exact songs and placement of the original 1991 animated musical locks them into that story structure. I don’t want the live-action remakes to be direct shot-for-shot duplicates of their animated counterparts. I think you can make a cashgrab that capitalizes on the success of the previous versions without just making the same movie a second time.
I think Emma Watson is a perfectly fine actress and not a very good singer, or - and this is an important distinction - a musical actress. In a musical, it is not enough to “just sing”, you have to act through your singing. And no one in this version actually does that, which is why the musical scenes fall so flat.
I do, however, think they should keep the scenes at the beginning and end where Audra McDonald sings at the balls while Stanley Tucci plays the harpsichord. That’s good, it’s diegetic, and you should always let Audra McDonald sing in everything she does.
Use Practical Make-up Effects for The Beast
I really like Dan Stevens. I think he’s a really charming actor who was absolutely capable of portraying a compelling Beast AND Prince. I think he was hindered here by two things - one of which was some bad script moments which I’ll cover later, but the other is the fact that they stuck him in a motion-capture suit to create the Beast look fully in CGI.
I think this made it hard for him, and it made it hard for everyone in scenes with him. I’m crotchety and old and I think mo-cap suits and entire greenscreen sets are bad for actors and bad for movies.
I know that good practical effects artists are expensive, but I really want to stress this: Beauty and the Beast 2017 had an estimated budget of $255 million, making it the 16th most expensive movie ever made at the time of this writing. What did they get for that money? Fuck all. I know the practical answer here is that make-up and costume and practical effects artists are unionized and the CGI artists are not. I still hate it. I probably hate it even more because of that. Unionize the CGI effects people but also still use practical effects for the Beast look.
Fix the Fucking Ball Gown
I’m sorry, I know this is the pettiest thing to carp on, but it’s emblematic of a larger problem here. Belle’s iconic yellow ballgown for the Tale as Old as Time scene. You know it. They fucked it up!
I’ve watched a lot of featurettes about the making of the dress, and the costuming in general, for this movie, because I was so curious how it could have gone so wrong. The costume designer for this movie is Jacqueline Durran, who is probably best known for her work with Joe Wright and Keira Knightley on Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, and Anna Karenina, all of which have gorgeous costumes. She also did the 2019 Little Women and this past year’s Cyrano, both of which also showcase really phenomenal work as a costumer.
I hate to say it but I think a lot of the problem stems from Emma Watson, who was really vocal about her refusal to wear a corset for this movie. To beat the dead horse here: corsets are not torture devices, there are a wide variety of types, including soft ones without boning at all, and this is basically like refusing to wear a bra for a modern movie. But at any rate, this affects the silhouettes of the dresses she could wear.
If you look at any scene with female extras, especially the opening and closing ball dances, you can see they are mostly wearing dresses that are a lot closer to historical accuracy, they’re wearing the iconic robe anglaise that was actually what wealthy and noble women wore at the time they’ve chosen to set this movie (to give the note: I don’t give two shits about “historical accuracy” in a fairy tale, but there was a clear attempt here to tie this movie to a specific time and place so I have a point here that I’ll get to in the script section).
This makes Belle’s dresses (both the very bad yellow ballgown, and her later white gown which I think is actually gorgeous on its own but also doesn’t work) extremely jarring, with a more modern silhouette that wouldn’t look out of place in the 1950s or 60s. I want to be generous and suggest that giving Belle more modern looks compared to the time-period-accurate looks of everyone else could be an intentional story beat to set her apart, to indicate that Belle is more of a modern thinker than those around her, that she’s ahead of her time. But absolutely nothing has indicated that this was intentional, so lmao. No.
It also wouldn’t fix the fact that the yellow dress is just kind of ugly. They try to do a Cinderella-esque transformation scene, but it only adds some extremely subtle gold embroidery at the hems that you can’t even see in wide shots. Like it’s almost comically anti-climactic. I also, and maybe this is just me, I always thought the animated version was intended to be GOLD. Like that’s what the markers of the animation always indicated to me. I don’t understand the decision to make it a flat yellow (I like yellow! I wear a lot of yellow! It doesn’t work here!).
You’re more than welcome to disagree with and criticize the goals of the Disney Princess brand, but to me, one of the most obvious things they can and should get right is the dresses. These movies all have that big dress scene, where some fantastical ballgown is revealed, so you can sell dolls and Halloween costumes to little girls. Is this a kind of crass goal? Yes. Is it an extremely achievable one, though? Also yes. To that end, The Dress has to be ethereal. It has to be magical. It has to look like something that shouldn’t possibly exist. Again, Cinderella 2015 achieved this.
I think if they had stuck Belle in a cloth-of-gold robe anglaise (it doesn’t need to be ACCURATE, but it needs to ALIGN with what else is seen in the movie) with the wide panniers and the heavy embroidery and the gold ribbon bodice, I think this really REALLY could have worked.
And now we get into the big category: Script and Writer Problems.
Hire a Woman Director and Screenwriter
This movie was directed by Bill Condon and the lead screenwriter was Stephen Chbosky. I think they were both bad choices, but especially Chbosky. This movie made a big deal about making a “more feminist” Beauty and the Beast, which I have a few qualms with (the 1991 movie is not anti-feminist! Belle is not some obedient wallflower in that movie!), but I think if that’s your goal, you should, at minimum, hire more women in creative leadership roles. I don’t think that’s a lot to ask for.
There’s a lot of women directors and screenwriters they could have hired for this, but I actually have one suggested pair that might be controversial, but I am stuck on this idea: get Sam Taylor-Johnson to direct and Kelly Marcel to write. Yes, this is the writer-director pair from the first Fifty Shades of Grey movie, before they were fired for clashing with EL James over changes to the source material. The thing is, the changes they wanted to make were good ones that improved the story, Sam Taylor-Johnson’s directing is one of the things that made the first movie bearable while later ones got much worse, and at its core, Fifty Shades of Grey is an erotic Beauty and the Beast story. So yeah, I just want to know what could have happened here.
Now I think there are some small script things that just having women in charge of this movie instead of men would have fixed. For example, I don’t think women would have written the scene where the Beast negs her about liking Romeo and Juliet (bad scene! Terrible lines!). And that alone would have improved this movie a lot in my estimation. But there’s two specific things I want to touch on with the script that I think need calling out.
The Weird Subplot with the Mom
I have never understood this about this movie. Belle knows that she and her father moved to this little provincial town, away from Paris, after a deadly plague swept the city. This is established in dialogue. Belle knows that her mother is dead and that her father doesn’t like to talk about her. This is established in dialogue. So why does Belle, an otherwise intelligent and clever woman, need this scene with a magic book to go back in time to Paris to see her mother dying of the plague? (Also I hate the magic time travel teleportation book. Get rid of the fucking book)
It felt like they were told to “answer” the critique that Disney Princesses mostly have dead moms who are never really mentioned. For one thing, I don’t think this is a critique that needs answering (fairy tales have a lot of dead moms because women die in childbirth. This is not rocket science); for another thing, I think this is a stupid way to answer it.
I would drop it entirely. I know part of the reason this was added was also to pad for time (1991 animated was 84 minutes; 2017 live-action was 129 minutes). There’s other, better ways you can extend the length of the movie, if you really and truly feel that’s something you need to do (I probably would still keep it under two hours, but that’s me). Personally, I would steal scene or two from Belle’s Enchanted Christmas, the direct-to-video sequel, because I’m terrible and ALSO need to be reined in sometimes. It’s fine.
“Teaching Another Girl to Read? Isn’t One Enough?” and the Time Period
This movie very strongly links the story to mid-1700s France. That’s fine, if they wanted to do that. I personally would not have done that, I think Cinderella 2015 works really well by not tying to a specific time period or country (there’s a scene where Ella is reading Samuel Pepys to her father which indicates sometime after the 1820s, but you know, they don’t linger on it, it’s not distracting).
If they were going to tie themselves so strongly to that place and time, they had to fix some things for it to work. The first is the aforementioned dress issue, with Emma Watson’s costumes being extremely jarring against every other costume shown on screen. The second is the “girls’ literacy” issue. All of the dialogue in this movie indicates that this little provincial area does not support girls’ literacy, most of the girls don’t know how to read except Belle, and that the very concept is frowned upon.
This is pretty fucking strange for 1700s France, where literacy was extremely high, even among the lower classes, and yes, among women and girls. The original Beauty and the Beast story was published in France in 1756 in a magazine of stories for young girls, which - I cannot stress this enough - would not have existed if there was not an existing audience of literate young girls reading them.
The issue of education for women is a really really easy and lazy shorthand for modern writers to show sexism in the past, even in obviously ahistorical ways. It happens here; it also really bothered me in both Dickinson (the Apple TV show about Emily Dickinson, where they show her father being unsupportive of her reading Shakespeare, when in fact he was extremely dedicated to her education and she had a better education than most women of her time), and the upcoming Emily Bronte movie (which, from the trailer, has scenes extremely similar to the ones in Dickinson, despite the Bronte sisters also receiving a good education and their father being supportive of this).
I don’t know. I know it’s an easy way to get modern audiences to get the gist, but it’s lazy and it’s inaccurate and I don’t like it. They could have done more with Belle’s tinkering and inventing, and had the town be distrustful of her strange gadgets and contraptions to get the same idea across without the weird points about “teaching a girl to read”.
So yeah, I guess that’s over 2000 words on how I would have fixed the 2017 live-action Beauty and the Beast, and maybe now I can exorcize this movie from my brain and stop rewatching and itching at all the things I would change.